The train that now arrived was observed by a series of cameras, but they did not observe what Kenyon saw: the bluish morning light, the veiled quality of the hills across the estuary; the sight of a large gull lodged diagonally on the wind like a back-slash, veering into the train’s direction, veering off again with a call like a harsh but happy yell; a sudden and brief shadowing of the light as a single cloud fell over the early sun; the silent moon like a fingernail in the sky; a dog racing against the train in its back garden, and barking in joy as it ran. At most, shadows on the film and the digital flow, not seen at all by the mechanical recording angels along our paths, seen only by Kenyon. The cameras watched him as he got out at the central station, not mounting the London train now waiting at platform five but leaving the station instead; watched him climb the hill to the bus station; watched him wait and mount the Harvesthaye bus, paying, however, by cash (a little detective work would be needed here to go on following Kenyon’s tracks); watched the bus heave itself up the hill by the hospital and, a dozen times, past some building in need of protection or observation, and then another dozen times.
By chance, the stop that he got off at was opposite a bank, and the house that he walked to, three minutes away, just past a school with two great lenses at its gates. So his progress was remarked. He had been filmed or his actions recorded fifty times between getting up and nine thirty, when he got to the place he was getting to. The remote and patiently employed angels could have discovered that he had told his employers over the phone that he was ill, that he had phoned a man who lived seven miles away, once, and that that man owned the house he now found himself at the door of, that he had got out money and would not for another couple of days: money, it could be deduced, to keep him and the man in takeaway pizza for a day or two. But they could not have told, because the door was out of sight, with what delight and happiness the man, whose name was Ahmed Khalil, as the authorities could have discovered, opened the door to Kenyon, the way in which, the door closed behind them, they fell on each other, feeding on each other with a fury concentrated in the mouth and lips, their hands on each other, roaming and gripping as Kenyon’s clothes were pulled off and fell to the floor, his lover’s bathrobe falling open as Kenyon went to his knees. Could not know, either, how both of them, in middle age, felt once again, for the ninth time, a rejuvenation in their lust, the sense of the teenage. The cameras in the street could not have told the secrets of the human heart; they could not and did not see Kenyon and Ahmed, meeting for the ninth time in this way. But you did, and I did.
BOOK TWO
THE KING OF THE BADGERS
The King of the Badgers is one of Uncle’s best friends and neighbours, but he was away arranging a loan from a foreign banker.
J.P. MARTIN, Uncle Cleans Up
1.
There was a spume of hurt up his innards. The dwarves with their miniature flame-thrower had been at their small-hours labour. David woke with a runnel of liquid, burning puke at the back of his throat, now actually spurting up into his mouth. He was upright already in his bed, knowing quite well that there was no heartburn medicine in the house. If there had been, he would have taken two large dessertspoonfuls, after the evening’s solitary entertainment: most of a roast chicken, mashed potatoes and peas, half a sticky toffee pudding with cream, God knew how many thyme-flavoured biscuits with the Borough Market Caerphilly on top, fetched in batches from the kitchen during the commercial breaks and eaten during the entertainment. And a bottle of white wine on top of two gin-and-tonics. You deserve it, he had said to himself last night, when setting out on the first of two gin-and-tonic, thinking of the bloody horrible day he’d had, the bloody horrible week he’d had, the bloody horrible life he had. You deserve it, he said to himself now, in the dark, sweating, a burning trickle of watery vomit subsiding slowly back down his throat and his heart banging like a broken dynamo. Was that a tightening around his chest—the iron band that foreshadowed a heart attack? He sat quite still, his attention all on the uncontrollable revolts of his body, and in a few moments his hypochondria quietened itself, too.
He reached for his watch on the bedside table. His vision, or perhaps just his eyes, wobbled a little before managing to focus on the green luminous dials. It was ten to eight. He had managed, after all, to sleep through the night before the heartburn had woken him; he had not had to get up to pee. A bonus, he supposed. ‘You never go through the night after the age of thirty-five,’ David’s friend Richard was fond of saying—it was almost his only principle in life. David himself was thirty-six. He hadn’t gone through the night, as Richard called it, in ten years. He put this unusual extended unconsciousness down to the drink.
In a moment, he forced himself out of bed, wrapped his bulk in the blue cotton yukata. He looked around for the sash—it could be more or less anywhere in the chaos of the flat, and in the end he gripped the dressing-gown closed at the front. He shuffled through the flat, kicking aside some bit of food packaging on the floor of the kitchen where he had dropped it the night before and done nothing about it. He had not felt drunk when he went to bed, but oddly enough he felt quite drunk now. It was just tiredness. He would be fine to drive into London this morning. He gave the tap a good twist, and the water began to pour. A cup of coffee and he would be perfectly all right for the long drive down to Devon. Mauro was expecting to be picked up at nine thirty from his flat in Clapham; David didn’t suppose he would make that now, but Mauro could wait.
David turned off the mixer tap and lowered himself into the bath. Outside, overhead, there was the heavy clatter of a police helicopter. More and more often, on a Friday or a Saturday night, you were woken by the police helicopter hovering over St Albans, observing some fleeing villain and a bag of weed in a stolen car with their infra-red and their ultra-violet or whatever. The villainy and the small-hours helicopter had been two of the main reasons David’s parents had moved to their remote Devon village the year before. David supposed it was the same anywhere—sirens, helicopters, stolen cars, noise and chaos. He had never before heard the police helicopter at breakfast time on a Saturday morning. At that moment, it occurred to him that it was inexplicably dark outside.
He finished washing himself with the lavender soap, plunging and huffing and nose-clearing in the tub, like an oily walrus; he washed his hair with the last of the orange-flower shampoo, wetting his head by sliding backwards and putting his hair under water, rinsing the foam off in the same way. There was no clock in the bathroom, and the kitchen clock above the stove, under a thick single eyebrow of deposited grease, had needed its battery changed for at least seven months. It was really very dark for eight o’clock at this time of year; David assembled the facts laboriously, and started to wonder. He wrapped himself in a towel, and went back through the pitch-dark kitchen to his bedroom. He turned on the bedside light, observing the chaos of his sheets and duvet, and picked up his watch. It was a quarter to two in the morning. Somehow, he had picked up and read his watch upside down, and had mistaken—what?—he worked it out: ten to eight for twenty past one.
That was a new addition to the fears of the night, to add to heartburn, insomnia, three a.m. terrors of loneliness, impoverishment, hell and damnation and the so-far-evaded attentions of the authorities for some negligence or other. And the promise of dying in your sleep from being so fucking fat; that was a good one. To all those, he could add the strong possibility that, from now onwards, he might at any time wake up, mistake the time, wash and dress and probably even leave the house under the impression that the watch went that way up. No wonder he felt mildly drunk and confused; he had gone to bed only an hour and a quarter before. Normal people like Mauro were asleep now; normal people like Mauro, with his bright smile and his dark eyes and his shaved chest, sharp with stubble under an exploring hand, were at this moment being licked all over, were enjoying the best sex of their lives, the sex that had happened with any number of successful pick-ups already that week. That was probably what normal peop
le like Mauro were doing at this hour of the morning. The thought kept David staring into the dark, long after he had turned his bedside light off. He couldn’t imagine why he had asked Mauro to come with him to visit his parents and pretend to be his new boyfriend.
2.
David had met Mauro only eight months before. Three couples that David knew, knew of, or worked with had separately announced that they were going to be taking advantage of the new legislation and getting married. ‘It’s only a very small affair, though,’ all three of them had apologetically stated to David before not inviting him. Whenever David heard of an engagement or a marriage of this sort, he was plunged into some gloom. Previously, gay life had seemed a merry series of cabinet reshuffles and rearrangements, in which everyone was single for a time, then paired off for a time. If you stood still with a welcoming smile on your face, sooner or later somebody would come over and sit on it.
The introduction of marriages for men to men and women to women rather blew a hole in David’s theory. He could not go on thinking that the paired-off couples he knew were in the middle of an interlude between inevitable periods of singleness. He had assumed that any relationship was thought of by those involved as one in an indefinite series, highly provisional. Largely believing this because he tried to think that, sooner or later, his gay acquaintances would decide to resort to him as a partner, once they had run out of most other possibles, David was astonished to discover that these people, in fact, did believe that the relationship they were in was a permanent one. The regular exchanges and alterations of his friends in their twenties gave way to an immured bliss. David never saw them any more; they had just disappeared behind the garden gate and the Heal’s catalogue.
It had been two years since he had gone away on holiday with anyone else, and that had been with his mother. (She had always wanted to go to Venice, and they did, while she could still get around on foot, she said; the pair of them had, in one church after another, bumped into each other with mirrors held like tea-trays, inspecting the ceiling frescos, and murmured a polite, solicitous apology. Anyone would have taken them for wife and fat husband.) It had been a year since he had had sex with another man, and the time before that had been in 2005. Both had been rent-boys, taken from an online catalogue, considered over the course of days, telephoned from St Albans and then visited in their flats in Earls Court and King’s Cross. Neither occasion had been a success. The second time, no part of David’s body, however minutely scrutinized, could, it seemed, raise an erection in the professional, and the rent-boy had closed his eyes and perhaps tried to think of some more encouraging flesh, without success in raising a response in his own. David had tried to be polite, then supportive, then sympathetic, then slightly catty. ‘It’s not me,’ the rent-boy had said. ‘Though I’m not a machine, you know. It’s you. I can’t do anything with someone as fat as you.’ David had taken the rebuke humbly, got dressed, handed over the money anyway and returned to the railway station to go home with the absolutely usual thoughts in his head.
‘Well, of course you’re not going to find anyone sitting up there in St Albans,’ his friend Richard had said, when David told him some, at least, of this. ‘Your parents don’t live there any more. The only people you know there are people you were at school with.’
‘And the bloke in the off-licence,’ said David, who was always keen to forestall accurate commentary about the defects of his life.
‘Yes, I thought that might be so,’ Richard said. ‘We all drink too much. Our parents never did—well, they do now, they drink like fish, but they never did when they were our age. What is it with us and our best friends who are the bloke in the off-licence?’
‘I don’t know,’ David said impatiently, thinking that the point of the conversation was getting lost in conjecture about the state of modern existence. ‘I’m not going to start a relationship with the bloke in the off-licence, in any case.’
‘You need to start making an effort,’ Richard said. ‘There’s a thing called the gay scene nowadays. It happens in large cities—London, Manchester, er, wherever. Did you ever hear of the St Albans gay village? There are bars, there are nightclubs, boys so off their faces they’d even go to bed with a fat slob like you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘A pleasure. You never know, you might meet someone who likes you for who you are. It does seem unlikely, though.’
‘You could put me in front of five hundred drunk gays, and I still wouldn’t know how to start a conversation with any of them,’ David said. ‘I just don’t know how. I don’t know how I ever got to meet anyone, really.’
‘Well, I know how you start up conversation in a nightclub,’ Richard said. ‘Take in a bottle of poppers, sniff it from time to time. You’ll be amazed how popular you get to be.’
‘I can’t bear that stuff,’ David said.
‘Everyone always says that,’ Richard said. ‘You’d be amazed, the boys who fancy a quick sniff off a fat man with a little brown bottle when it gets to three in the morning. Take my advice, seriously.’
‘I’ve got to get back to work,’ David said, because they were talking over the telephone in the middle of the day, Richard in his office and David at his desk. David’s colleague-cum-boss Dymphna had been walking up and down from time to time in the carpeted aisle, not exactly looking in his direction, but walking up and down and looking at him. As if she hadn’t overheard the whole conversation in this little office with just the two of them, and as if she were trying to behave like his boss.
Richard lived in London; he was a graphic designer. David admired the way he had somehow parlayed a degree in French into a career in a white office with great white desks like icebergs, swimming through a space converted from a Methodist church. He had, like David, apparently forgotten all the French he had ever known. In his dark suit and white shirt, his pepper-and-salt hair cropped tight around a tidy face, he was very different from the public schoolboy with the military delivery who had broken through his own reserve, telling David about his impossible sexual desires one night seventeen years before, in a room high up in a Reading fifteen-floor hall of residence. He was very different, apart from in one feature. Then he had, when it had come to it, refused to practise his sexual nature on David, even at four in the morning when drunk. David didn’t even need to ask; he certainly would refuse now.
Richard lived in Parsons Green, in a flat repainted white every other year, its furniture reconsidered every five, a new Brazilian installed every thirty-six months. He moved from one to another breathlessly, like the unwrapping prize in a game of Brazilian pass-the-parcel. The process occurred without any apparent interval of jealousy or despair. David had no idea how he had managed to stay friends with such a prodigy, such a prize, such a catch, and Richard’s friends, when occasionally, unavoidably encountered, gave the impression of thinking much the same thing. David, on the other hand, had gone back to the town he had grown up in after going to university in Reading. He had stayed there ever since, wanking mostly.
‘Come and stay,’ Richard said. ‘You can’t get back to St Albans on a Saturday night. Go out and get off your face, see what happens. You might not even need to stay with me. You’ll probably get a better offer.’
‘That’s bad luck,’ Richard said, some days later, when David suggested a date. ‘Rodrigo’ —the current thunderously brooding Carioca— ‘he’s had a date in the diary for months now. His best friend’s birthday party. No getting out of it, I’m afraid. We’ve had to reschedule it three times now.’
‘Well, what about the week after?’ David said, thinking that Richard’s boyfriend’s friend’s birthday party could hardly be both in the diary for months and three times rearranged.
‘Even worse, I’m afraid. Four graphic designers and their Australian accountant boyfriends coming for dinner to inspect Rodrigo. What is it with Australian accountants? People go on about air stewards and hairdressers. In Australia it’s accountants, apparently. Wouldn’t inflict that
one on you. No, the best thing is we cut our losses, you come that Saturday night, we’ll have a jolly early-evening drink, send you on your way, we’ll regroup and dissect and have the post-mortem over lunch on Sunday, just you and me, and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘And Fanny’s your aunt,’ David said aimlessly. He had known how it was to be.
He went to London anyway. The Brazilian—Rodrigo—got up wearily, lazily in the L-shaped sitting room, not putting away the remote control or switching off the Grand Prix on the television, only turning down the sound to a bluebottle whine. ‘Hello, I am Rodrigo,’ he said, putting out his hand—the side of his hand when gripped in a handshake was surprisingly calloused for a lawyer, if he was a lawyer, as Richard had claimed.
‘Hello, I am David,’ David said satirically, attempting to find something unerotic in Rodrigo’s appearance, barefoot and bare-chested in a pair of jeans, his grip like a lumberjack’s, and not succeeding; and, anyway, he had actually met Rodrigo twice before. With a look from Richard, Rodrigo took himself off, reappearing only ten minutes before they went out. Neither of them had dressed for a party, or was taking anything with him—a present, a bottle, a bunch of flowers. As they went out, Rodrigo and Richard in well-worn athletic hooded tops, David in his newly bought disco gear, David strongly suspected the pair of them of going out to see I Am Legend at the Fulham Road Odeon. In the meantime, every new topic of conversation Richard had introduced had begun with the words ‘Do you remember?’ It was shameful to be so impossible to introduce; David wondered what he could possibly bring to the nightclub that someone else would want to take away again, and for a moment he thought of going in all his finery to see I Am Legend himself. Perhaps not that: perhaps P.S. I Love You, the other film he quite wanted to see at the moment.
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